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<title>WinBolo Online Map editor</title>
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  <p><b><font face="Verdana,Arial" size="4" color="#FFFF00">WinBolo Online Map 
    Editor - Help</font></b></p>
    <p>Version 1.00 - John Morrison (<A HFREF="http:/www.winbolo.com"http://www.winbolo.com"</A>)</p>
  <p><br>
    <font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><b><font color="#FFFF00">About</font></b></font><br>
    WinBolo Online Map Editor (WOME) is a stateless cgi-based map editor for making 
    and editing <a href="http://www.winbolo.com/">WinBolo</a> maps. Although not 
    a replacement for a desktop based map editor it is rather neat (and a little pointless).</p>
  <p><br>
    <font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><b><font color="#FFFF00">Simple Help</font></b></font><br>
    From the Tools on the left select the terrain type or base/pill/start to place. 
    Click on the map to place it there. Use the Up/Down/Left/Right buttons to 
    move the map around or use the goto at the bottom of the page. When finished 
    click the save map button to save your map. You can upload a map by clicking 
    on the upload button.</p>
  <p><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><b><font color="#FFFF00">Know Issues <br>
    </font></b></font>
    <ul><li>Some times the browser places spaces between the map view squares. This is due to images loading at different speeds. Hit refresh in your browser to fix it.</li>
    <li>Mined tiles don't show up. (See todo)</li>
    <li>Netscape 4.7 is really slow to render tables. Try changing browsers.</li></ul></p>
    
  <p><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><b><font color="#FFFF00">Why?</font></b></font><br>
    I wrote this as a twisted form of stress relief inbetween preparing and taking part in a 
    2 day <a href="http://www.sqi.gu.edu.au/spice/">SPICE</a> assessment. Plus 
    it would give me a reason to do some real cgi and it is rather neat. Historically, 
    it was suggested by Creo on channel #winbolo on the irc network efnet.<br>
  </p>
  <p><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><b><font color="#FFFF00">How 
    it works</font></b></font><br>
    The idea was to create a stateless web based map editor. A couple of years 
    ago I wrote a program called <a href="http://members.xoom.com/jamorrison/bmapview.html">BMAPView</a> 
    which allowed viewing of WinBolo maps in Windows. (It was rather useless back 
    in 1998) The code was written in a quite portable and reuseable fashion. I 
    took the display view function and replaced the window out code with a HTML 
    table out function. A collection of simple modify functions were added to 
    set map cells. It took about 20 hours to write the whole cgi script. To keep it stateless do this 
    the map must be sent to and from the server with each request. Thus sending 
    the webpage to the user the map is compressed and then base64 encoded. Upon 
    doing an update the map is base64 decoded then decompressed. The map update 
    occurs then the result is sent back to the user after compression and encoding.<br>
  </p>
  <p><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><b><font color="#FFFF00">Todo<br>
    </font></b></font>
(These may or may not get done.)<br>
  </p>
  <ul>  <li>Preferences (+ Cookie storing) Allow the size of the currently viewable map 
    to be set, borders and cell padding.</li>
    <li>Allow adding mines to map (Would require adding mines to each of the graphics)</li>
    <li>General tidy up and userability increase. ie when we reach the top of the map remove the &quot;Up&quot; button.</li>
    <li>Vanity - Set the map name when set, display it in load on open</li>
    <li>Shrink outputed HTML files</li>
    <li>Map uploading. (Intergrate into winbolo.com so your map appears in the collection 
    - long shot maybe)</li>
    <li>Map overview. Show a 256x256 gif of the whole map. Maybe not feasible as the 
    editor is stateless and it would require a seperate cgi file reading the current 
    map in via a GET post. (GET's are unreliable after 200 bytes and most maps 
    are about 10K encoded)</li></ul>
  <p><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><b><font color="#FFFF00">Leasons 
    Learned</font></b></font><br>
    As I'm new to cgi here is a few things I learned.<br>
    1. Cgi (duh)<br>
    2. UUEncoding is bad for generating valid HTML.<br>
    3. image submission buttons don't send their values, just the x and y co-ordinates 
    of where the user is sent.</p>
  <p align="center">&nbsp;</p>
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          <div align="center"><a href="http://www.winbolo.com/wome/wome.cgi">Back to WOME</a></div>
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        <td>
          <div align="center"><a href="http://www.winbolo.com/">www.winbolo.com</a></div>
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  <p align="center">&nbsp;</p>
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